Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

RAW or Jpeg


  • Total voters
    18

J-see

Senior Member
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

Only RAW, it's bad enough already I have to convert the processed shot to JPEG.
 

carguy

Senior Member
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

Yeah, because none of the photos from the recent Olympics are any good. I mean, after all, all the photogs from Getty and AP shoot in JPEG; therefore, must not care about "getting the best result". Yawn....

"The second a photographer fires the shutter on a camera, the resulting image—a high quality JPEG, not an uncompressed RAW file—is transported by ethernet to Getty's central editing office in about 1.5 seconds."

http://gizmodo.com/the-inside-story-of-how-olympic-photographers-capture-s-1521746623
they do that due to the SHORT time constraints to get the images from the camera to publication ;)
 

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

Yeah, because none of the photos from the recent Olympics are any good. I mean, after all, all the photogs from Getty and AP shoot in JPEG; therefore, must not care about "getting the best result". Yawn....

"The second a photographer fires the shutter on a camera, the resulting image—a high quality JPEG, not an uncompressed RAW file—is transported by ethernet to Getty's central editing office in about 1.5 seconds."

http://gizmodo.com/the-inside-story-of-how-olympic-photographers-capture-s-1521746623

Jeff Cable photographed the Olympics, and he shot RAW. In fact I remember either reading or watching a video where he mentioned all the photographers would get on a bus, and he'd be quickly editing his RAW files while the others shot jpegs. He was the odd-man-out so to speak, but he had to keep within the parameters of what was acceptable editing.
 
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

RAW for a long time now. BUT reading this thread I think I will switch over to RAW plus JPEG on my next shoot and only post the resized jpeg only just to see how they look. Force myself to shoot a good as I possibly can.
 

wev

Senior Member
Contributor
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

Jpeg only. For the work I do at the Hort department and my idle imagery posted here, there is no point to RAW.
 

AC016

Senior Member
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

they do that due to the SHORT time constraints to get the images from the camera to publication ;)

Yes, they do. That was made very obvious in the article. They also do it because raw files are to large to transmit fast. That was also stated in the article.
 
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

The Nikons do have setting to fine tune JPEG shooting. There are also multiple "Channels" for JPEG that can be fine tuned differently. I guess if one were to take the time to set these for the different kinds of shooting that you do and be very careful to shoot consistently you could probably come close to RAW. Lots of "IFs". RAW really shines for being able to fine tune after the fact. Lets us shoot faster and looser and still get excellent results on more of our photos.
 

cwgrizz

Senior Member
Challenge Team
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

After shooting with a point & shoot for years which produced jpeg, I began shooting jpeg with the Nikon DSLR. Then I read about RAW and looked for software to process it. Finding View NX2 and Capture NX-D I started shooting RAW + jpeg with the idea that if I couldn't get the RAW processing right, I still had the jpeg. Knowledge of the processes, etc. frankly were a little overwhelming at first and was why I erred on the side of caution saving in both formats, jpeg & RAW. To be truthful, I don't remember using the jpeg versions for anything to date. Then after reading Aroy's statement "Shoot RAW, then use the supplied free View NX-II to batch process the RAW to jpeg", I may just change my settings to RAW only. Makes sense to me. I hadn't thought about it before, but Aroy in a round-a-bout way made a good point. Processing to jpeg using View NX2 is doing on the computer what the camera when it saves in jpeg format, only just using an extra step, if needed.
 

J-see

Senior Member
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

The Nikons do have setting to fine tune JPEG shooting. There are also multiple "Channels" for JPEG that can be fine tuned differently. I guess if one were to take the time to set these for the different kinds of shooting that you do and be very careful to shoot consistently you could probably come close to RAW. Lots of "IFs". RAW really shines for being able to fine tune after the fact. Lets us shoot faster and looser and still get excellent results on more of our photos.

I doubt it's possible to fine-tune a JPEG to come close to a RAW file. There are so little options in comparison and any judgement call we make, we do so on a 10$ LCD screen that is calibrated not to be as accurate as possible but to show the shot as clear as possible. It could be a nice challenge but I'd fear JPEG would stand no chance. Try fine-tuning it so that it overexposed only a portion of the shot or when doing architecture decreases the temperature of the granite while increasing the limestone.

It's like trying to fine-tune a Fiat Uno in order to compete with the rest in Formula 1. ;)
 
re: Do you shoot "Raw" or "Jpeg"

I doubt it's possible to fine-tune a JPEG to come close to a RAW file. There are so little options in comparison and any judgement call we make, we do so on a 10$ LCD screen that is calibrated not to be as accurate as possible but to show the shot as clear as possible. It could be a nice challenge but I'd fear JPEG would stand no chance. Try fine-tuning it so that it overexposed only a portion of the shot or when doing architecture decreases the temperature of the granite while increasing the limestone.

It's like trying to fine-tune a Fiat Uno in order to compete with the rest in Formula 1. ;)

Hince the reason I shoot RAW. But if you read my post there were a lot of "Ifs"
 
[Disclaimer: I am not advocating shooting JPEG over RAW. I will continue to shoot RAW 95.3% of the time.]

I shot all these today in JPEG Fine. The only corrections are brightness, contrast, straightening and cropping when needed.
don_1679.jpg
don_1663.jpg
don_1667.jpg
don_1675.jpg
don_1669.jpg
don_1678.jpg
don_1662.jpg
don_1660.jpg
don_1668.jpg
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
I doubt it's possible to fine-tune a JPEG to come close to a RAW file. There are so little options in comparison and any judgement call we make, we do so on a 10$ LCD screen that is calibrated not to be as accurate as possible but to show the shot as clear as possible. It could be a nice challenge but I'd fear JPEG would stand no chance. Try fine-tuning it so that it overexposed only a portion of the shot or when doing architecture decreases the temperature of the granite while increasing the limestone.

It's like trying to fine-tune a Fiat Uno in order to compete with the rest in Formula 1. ;)
And this, I think, gets to the heart of the issue...

No one is saying you can't get good shots shooting JPG. If shooting conditions are ideal, or close to it, JPG can really hold it's own and be a time saver because it won't require much processing. Sure you can tweak a JPG; exposure, color balance and so forth can all be adjusted, no problem.

The really big difference, the one thing that really matters, I think, is Latitude.

As [MENTION=31330]J-see[/MENTION] points out, you can't tune a Fiat to compete in Formula 1 but *why* not? Because the Fiat simply doesn't have what it takes to begin with and you can't tweak what you don't have. What I get when I shoot RAW is a degree of latitude a JPG simply can't touch. For one thing, it's an 8-bit file. All JPG's are 8-bit and there's no getting around that. For those who don't already know, each color channel (Red, Green and Blue) in a JPG can use 256 shades for each of those channels; a a total of 16 million tonal values or colors (256 shades of Red x 256 shades of Green x 256 shades of Blue =16.2 million total color combinations). A twelve-bit RAW file, on the other hand, has 4,096 shades of color per channel for total of over 68 billion colors (and that "b" is not a typo). JPG is already starting to look a little woozy but we're not done because our Nikon cameras can produce 14-bit RAW files and while those extra bits of color may not sound like much lets do the math anyway...

I had to do the math manually (meaning with a calculator) because I can't find figures online for tonal values of 14-bit RAW files. It's an easy thing to calculate, though, and anyone who wants to can check my figures. Here's what I get after crunching the numbers: A 14-bit RAW file equates to 16,383 colors per channel (even I'm a little surprised at this) for a total tonal range of 4.3 trillion color values. To kind of put these huge numbers into perspective, a 14-bit RAW file contains as many as 2.7 thousand times as many tonal values as JPG. Personally; I refuse to throw away that much latitude, that much sheer tonal information about my shots. It's a BIG reason why I shoot with a DSLR.

So yeah, if you need to go to the corner grocery, both your Fiat and your Formula 1 race car will get you there and back. The difference is the F1 will do things your Fiat can't begin to imagine doing and nothing you or anyone else can do to it will allow it to keep pace with the F1.

....
 

aroy

Senior Member
Yes, you cannot tune a Fiat to that level, unless it comes from their Ferrari or Maserati plant.

Even 12 bit RAW has 50% more colours than jpeg. One thing that jpeg cannot do is to manipulate the 12/14bit colour information in its 8 bits. It maps those extra bits to its 8 bits, and that is it. When we recover "Shadows" or "Blown Highlight", we are actually utilising those extra 4/6 bits of information in RAW (in this case the light intensities) to bring them within the 8 bit of jpeg.
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
Even 12 bit RAW has 50% more colours than jpeg.
This is a common misunderstanding. 12 bits is not 50% more than 8 bits. We're talking about Binary so the calculations need be done in Binary. The actual math looks like this...

1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 = 8-bit. If we add those up (1 + 2 + 4 + 8 ... + 128) we get 255. Including zero that gives us 256 values. This is per color-channel so to get the total number of possible colors we multiply again: 256 x 256 x 256 = 16.7 million.

To get 14-bit we have to continue on the Binary scale for fourteen iterations:

1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048 4096 8192 = 14 bit. Add those up and you get 16,383. Including zero that gives us 16,384 values. This too is per color-channel so once again we multiply it out for each of three color channels: Red, Blue and Green. Doing that gives us over 4.3 trillion.

That means a JPG equates to less than 0.4% of a 14-bit RAW file.

....
 

WayneF

Senior Member
That means a JPG equates to less than 0.4% of a 14-bit RAW file.
..

Binary math is right, and Raw is very good, but not quite that good. :) Raw suffers from the Bayer pattern. One JPG pixel is three RGB colors. One Raw pixel is one color, R or G or B. So RGB from Raw has to be interpolated from neighboring pixels too. This is a loss of ultimate resolution, and is one reason for megapixels in excess of any reasonable print size.

This is of course all true about the camera JPG too, original source is the Raw.

Really, the JPG vs Raw argument is mostly just about if the camera automatic processing finishes it (converts to JPG), using camera settings we probably set months ago (not related to THIS scene at all). And the camera tools, like White Balance, are pretty crude, rarely just right. We don't know the correct color to specify, not until we see the result.

Or does Raw software allow US to do it, based on the results we can SEE happened in this specific image, so we KNOW what will be the best course.

That conversion is 12 or 14 bits either way.

However, subsequent JPG processing because the camera did it poorly, is 8 bits. Also, then the first work has to be UNDONE, additional data shifting, in that 8 bits.

It really comes down to how much you care about your images. Make do, good enough, or you want it better?
 
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Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
Binary math is right, and Raw is very good, but not quite that good. :) Raw suffers from the Bayer pattern. One JPG pixel is three RGB colors. One Raw pixel is one color, R or G or B. So RGB from Raw has to be interpolated from neighboring pixels too. This is a loss of ultimate resolution, and is one reason for megapixels in excess of any reasonable print size.

This is of course all true about the camera JPG too, original source is the Raw.
Well I'm pretty sure my math is correct, so I'm feeling pretty confident RAW really *is* "that good". I did say in my previous post that JPG's rendered up to 16.2 million colors and the correct number is 16.7 million, but my second post uses the correct values. I need to go back and edit where I stated, "16.2 million".

Your description of camera resolution sounds more like you're talking about actual, or measured, Megapixels vs Effective Megapixels. Or perhaps I'm not understanding you correctly.

....
 

sonicbuffalo_RIP

Senior Member
These debates are fun.....gives me cause to think about why I shoot the way I do. In the past I have shot double barrel raw. I think I will from now on, shoot raw + .jpg. I see no reason to shoot double barrel raw, as I would just be duplicating my shots. If I shot both raw & .jpg, I have a choice on which format to use depending on what I want to do with the shots. Does anyone have any good reason not mentioned for shooting both formats? I know if a card is corrupted during the shooting, fomatting, etc., that I will be stuck with which ever format wasn't affected. I guess I'm willing (in most cases) to take that chance. Anybody have any other ideas about this?
 

J-see

Senior Member
Why would you shoot both if you do not directly need them? It's close to no effort to set the same cam settings for JPEG in post and hit convert as.

I only shoot RAW. I see little need to have an additional JPEG I'm going to delete anyways. All the extra JPEG does for me is slow things down.
 

WayneF

Senior Member
Well I'm pretty sure my math is correct, so I'm feeling pretty confident RAW really *is* "that good". I did say in my previous post that JPG's rendered up to 16.2 million colors and the correct number is 16.7 million, but my second post uses the correct values. I need to go back and edit where I stated, "16.2 million".

Your description of camera resolution sounds more like you're talking about actual, or measured, Megapixels vs Effective Megapixels. Or perhaps I'm not understanding you correctly.

....

I'm thinking you may not have read it right. I was hoping you would think: "Of course". I understood it. :)

I said the math was right, even the 0.4% was divided right, but the interpretation was questionable. :) It is not a useful number. We cannot view Raw files (and would not like it if we could).

It requires at least four Raw pixels to convert to one RGB pixel (Bayer). Pixel count does remain the same, but the data becomes interpolated. That is a loss of resolution, true of any digital camera (except Foveon - do they still exist?). So the camera JPG suffered this issue too. Any JPG did. They all suffer the same process, from the original Raw. So FWIW, your 0.4% number is true of camera JPG or JPG from Adobe Raw, but it is not the right way to view this conversion of 4 pixels to one RGB value. Does not take it into account.

It is only any subsequent 8 bit JPG processing that suffers. Subsequent Raw processing is still 12 bits, same as the camera did it, so really, the difference is we can see what we are doing, instead of blind wishful hoping with our crude camera settings.

But in general, at least very often (certainly pertinent to this JPG vs. Raw discussion) that camera JPG idea is done to avoid doing any processing at all. Don't know how, don't want to, don't really care, don't want to look at them again, whatever, but the common idea is to avoid doing any processing. This practice seems questionable, but in those cases, at least there is no difference in the bit depth.
 
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